Corporate Desktop Operating System Trends, Q3 2008 To Q2 2009

With Windows 7 generally available on October 22, 2009, most IT operations professionals are in a holding pattern. They successfully standardized on Windows XP, couldn't justify an upgrade to Windows Vista in tough economic times — or simply didn't even attempt to given the political hot button that Windows Vista has become — and plan to start their enterprisewide Windows 7 deployments in the late 2010/early 2011 time frame in line with the start of the next anticipated major corporate PC refresh cycle. Forrester's analysis of more than 85,000 enterprise clients found that Windows XP, while still king, is finally beginning its long-anticipated decline in the corporate PC market. Picking up ground are both Windows Vista, which now powers approximately 12% of Windows PCs, and Mac OS X, which has ramped up to an impressive 3.6%. With Snow Leopard arriving in September, the desktop OS market has hit the calm before the storm. This is affording IT ops professionals the time to focus their attention on developing their next-generation desktop strategies and determining just how large an impact mobility, virtualization, and consumerization will have.